He was selling scrap for Christmas money. Now his family is suing Boeing and UPS.

Matthew Sweets survived the initial crash of Flight 2976 with third-degree burns over nearly his entire body. He died two days later.

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Matthew Sweets was at Grade A Auto Parts on November 4, 2025, selling scrap metal he'd collected at job sites, trying to make a little extra money for Christmas. His family didn't know it would be the last thing he ever did.

Monday, Sweets' family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Jefferson Circuit Court against The Boeing Company, UPS, UPS Airlines, four UPS executives, General Electric, and VT San Antonio Aerospace- the maintenance contractor that serviced the plane just 17 days before it went down. The complaint doesn't just allege negligence. It alleges that Boeing and UPS knew about the exact structural flaw that doomed Flight 2976, for decades, and chose not to fix it.

UPS Flight 2976, a cargo freighter, crashed just after takeoff from Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport on November 4, 2025, killing 15 people and injuring several more. The left engine and pylon separated from the aircraft during its takeoff roll, and the plane went down in an industrial area near the airport, sparking a fire that took more than 30 hours to fully contain.

The Sweets family's lawsuit is not the first tied to the crash. Other victims' families have already filed suit.

‘He tried to run with his granddaughter’: New UPS crash lawsuits reveal harrowing details of November disaster

Filings describe a grandfather’s final moments, a family business destroyed, and insurance failures compounding the crisis. “I’m Shay McAlister, and this is Shay Informed: an independent, ad-free platform dedicated to honest journalism with compassion and clarity. Are you new here? Sign up for the free weekly newsletter

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Meet Matthew Sweets

Matt was 37. He was Brooke Murray's partner and the father of their two young kids. He was the son of Michael and Pamela Sweets, and the brother of twins Carrie Ryan and Michelle Sweets. At the time of the crash, he was enrolled at Independent Electrical Contractors of Kentuckiana, on track to get his electrician's license in May of this year- something the complaint says he was doing specifically to build a better life for Brooke and their kids.

He never got to walk across that stage.

What happened to him

The complaint lays out, in painful detail, what Matt went through. He was directly in the path of the crash when UPS Flight 2976 came down near the airport. The fire covered him in third-degree burns over nearly his entire body- so complete that his clothes burned off him; all that was left was his belt, fused to his skin.

A Grade A Auto Parts employee named Adam Bowman heard Matt screaming from inside the smoke and flames, found him, and carried him roughly 70 yards to safety on his back. According to Bowman's affidavit, attached as an exhibit to the complaint, Matt was alive, conscious, and asking for water the entire time. When Bowman and a coworker finally got Matt onto a truck bed to find help, the first police officer they approached reportedly froze, unable to give directions "after seeing his condition."

Matt was transferred to UofL Hospital's care at 5:54 p.m.- 41 minutes after the crash- still awake and alert. Doctors performed multiple escharotomies, emergency incisions to relieve pressure from his burns. He went into multi-system organ failure. His heart stopped the next morning, and the medical team resuscitated him after an extended round of chest compressions that broke a rib and punctured a lung- all witnessed by his family, who had gathered around his bed. He died on November 6, 2025.

The allegation at the center of it all: Boeing knew

The lawsuit centers on a specific part: the spherical bearing race assembly in the MD-11's wing pylon, the piece that helps hold the engine to the wing.

According to the complaint- and to sworn NTSB hearing testimony quoted at length in the filing- Boeing knew this component had a documented history of cracking and failing going back to at least 2002. The lawsuit cites a chart presented at a May 2026 NTSB investigative hearing showing reported bearing race fractures in 2002, 2007 (twice), 2008, and 2009, well before the plane involved in this crash had even reached the cycle count where inspections were required.

Boeing's response, per the complaint, wasn't to mandate a fix. In 2015, Boeing asked the FAA to extend the inspection interval for that exact component- from 19,900 flight cycles to 29,260- and, according to testimony from NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy at the hearing, did so using data from the aircraft's original 1990 certification rather than the actual in-service failure reports Boeing had on hand. The FAA approved the extension in about a month, according to the lawsuit.

The complaint alleges Boeing never reported any of the ten known bearing race failures across the MD-11 fleet to the FAA- including a 2007 report that an aft lug had actually cracked as a result of one of these bearing failures. The only failures the FAA ever learned about, according to the complaint, came from FedEx's safety reporting, not Boeing's.

The plane that crashed in Louisville had accumulated 21,043 pressurization cycles at the time of the crash. Had the original, tighter inspection interval stayed in place, the lawsuit argues, this aircraft would have been due for the very inspection that would have caught the problem- before it ever left the ground on November 4.

There's a specific line in the complaint that's hard to read as anything but the case's thesis, stated plainly: "Matthew Hagan Sweets would be alive. His children would still have their father."

I have reached out to Boeing for a comment and will update this story when I hear back.

A UPS Spokesperson provided the following statement:
We remain deeply saddened by Flight 2976. Our focus continues to be on supporting those affected and working closely with the National Transportation Safety Board as the investigation continues.

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